The Pentagon Labyrinth

and captains who fought and won the battle. The other is a story of failed
generalship, one that explains why Iraq's Republican Guard escaped, ensuring
that Saddam Hussein's regime survived and America's war with Iraq dragged on.
Certain to provoke debate, this is the latest book from the controversial and
influential military veteran whose two previous books, Breaking the Phalanx
and Transformation Under Fire, are credited with influencing thinking and
organization inside America's ground forces and figure prominently in current
discussions about military strategy and defense policies.”
Bruce Porter, War and the Rise of the State (Free Press, 2002). Bruce
Gudmundsson describes it as laying out the interrelationship between the rise of
the state as an institution and the way that wars have been fought in the past five
centuries. In doing so, it makes the classic argument that the modern state and
modern armies grew in tandem and that, in particular, the welfare state is largely
a product of the total wars of the 20th century.
Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States
Military Strategy and Policy (Indiana University Press, 1977). The book argues
that there are two distinct traditions in the way the United States fights wars, one
based upon maneuver and the other upon the massive application of firepower.
In the course of doing this, it also provides an accessible introduction to
American military history.
Insurgency and Fourth Generation Warfare
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Robert B. Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History (Doubleday,
1975). “… survey of guerrilla warfare begins with the struggle between Persian
king Darius and Scythian irregulars and concludes with the mujahedin resistance
to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He discusses how great commanders such
as Hannibal and Napoleon dealt with irregulars and how counterinsurgency
experts such as Sir Gerald Templar during the Malayan Emergency in the early
1950s found ways to defeat the guerrilla.”
Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone (Zenith Press, 2004). A classic,
this is one of several contemporary quality analyses available on insurgent
warfare.
T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (Anchor, 1991). This is
another classic description of insurgent warfare. Advocates of “Fourth
Generation War” as something entirely new are well advised to review T. E.
Lawrence’s descriptions of it in the First World War.
William S. Lind et al., “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth
Generation,” The Marines Corps Gazette, October 1989. This 1989 article